Oahu To Maui By Hawaii Superferry, #73

Early Afternoon In Kahului, Maui, Hawaii, October '08, artistic view, click to enlarge.

Aloha.
A Hawaii Superferry has been in operation for a while after many previous delays. Now things are pretty smooth, and you can enjoy trips between Oahu and Maui several times per week. It is always a good idea to reserve seats ahead of time. From Honolulu to Kahului, the departure time was around 6:00am the day we chose to travel to Maui. This means waking up in your hotel around 3:30am in the morning, after going to bed around 1:00am, you see why buying tickets ahead of time is a good idea. Whether to take your car with you is a decision you have to make, we will give you some hints. For about $10/day you can leave your car at the Pier, and not to worry about it. The downside is that now you have no car to drive in Maui and have to rent it, again preferably ahead of time. Inside the Superferry, there was plenty of room to seat the day we traveled; only about half of seats were occupied. Be prepared for a very cold inside, so a thick jacket is mandatory. The low temperature is supposed to keep people away from getting seasick. You are going to read a lot about that with plenty of remedies how to deal with it. I could count no more than four people being affected by it. It is a very unpleasant feeling, especially bad if you happened to have a good breakfast, since now the breakfast tends to come out! Our advice to deal with that problem, is to simply skip the morning breakfast and have only few sips of water. There is plenty of food to buy on the Superferry, this may not be the best of ideas, and it is up to you to decide. The Pacific Ocean between islands can be very rough, so the seasickness is one of the possible outcomes, another one is that the cars on the Superferry can move and get damaged. The are reports of this indeed happening. We told you to leave your car at the Pier, didn’t we? The Superfurry does not travel very fast, we are talking over three hour travel time, something closer to two hours would be more tolerable. The rough Pacific Ocean does not allow for that, at least for now. Apparently, a new model is being built and tested, hopefully a faster one.
If you forgot about something thick to wear, you will be coughing after the trip, but that is the only downside we can think of. During the trip, it is mostly water outside the windows, so watch a movie or two played on many big screens. If you happen to sit closer to windows, need to figure out which one, you can watch both Molokai and Maui provided you travel during the day, at night only some island lights are visible.
When you arrive, you are going to be hit with 80+F temperature, a very nice surprise after sitting inside in cold for over three hours.

In summary: (1) skip morning breakfast, or don’t eat much about four hours before the departure time in the afternoon or evening, (2) leave your car at the Pier, (3) sit in the center of the large room toward its back, (4) skip all food during the travel, (5) definitely have something warm with you.
With those points in mind, you can enjoy two beautiful Hawaiian Islands, and in the near future additional islands as well. Only pleasant things remain in our memories.
Mahalo everyone.

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Island Car Tips To Remember, #72

Always Photogenic, Lanikai Beach, Kailua, Hawaii, October '08, artistic view, click to enlarge.

Aloha.
Driving by car is perhaps the best way to get around Hawaiian Islands. Although there are many bus tours that can take you almost everywhere, we prefer our own way of transportation. No need to wait for the bus, no need to check time the bus leaves, no need to have interest in all places the bus stops at, etc. However, if you like to be always in a group of 30-40 people, feel safer that way, like to perhaps save some money, then the bus tour approach may be right for you. A motorcycle is also good, a bicycle less so because of the heavy traffic, especially in Honolulu. In summer months, everything inside the car is going to get very hot, so make sure you do not leave kids, any animals, or even food inside.
Parking around Honolulu can be a problem, streets are narrow, and some malls only have a very limited number of parking spaces available. However, the biggest problems are with parking in your own hotel, and if you happen to rent a large car, you are going to spend lots of time in the parking garage under the hotel, driving backward and forward, trying to park and avoiding hitting other cars. The worst situation happens when you come back from the beach around 9 or 10pm on weekend, because inevitably near all spaces will already be taken, and the one remaining for you is in the dark corner, at 45 degree angle, between two cement columns, and two big cars, one of them parked half-legally, almost blocking your access. Imagine it is very hot underground, and there is no good ventilation, you are sweating profusely trying to figure out what to do. Several towing and “Don’t Park Here” reminders on walls, for $20/day. Moreover, the squeaky sound of tires is more than you can handle!
Outside of hotels, and away from Honolulu, things are usually problem free. If there are special events, attended by many people, then obviously you need to consider that. Therefore, our advice to you would be to think twice about renting a large car, a rental place agent will always try to upgrade your reservation to a larger car, but this may mean problems down the road. Hope you learned something new from this blog. In a smaller car, you are free as a bird!
Mahalo everyone.

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#42, Ala Moana

Looking Good Tonight, Waikiki, Hawaii, May ‘08, artistic view.

There are many people in Waikiki every night between 8pm and 11pm. You can walk around just watching tourists from many places around the world, especially Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and of course the US. All shops and restaurants are open well into the night and early morning hours, and people are indeed everywhere. End of May temperatures are already quite high and the humidity is also high. But everything is still quite tolerable, and after spending several days there, and drinking lots of bottled water, quite tolerable. It is only about 100 feet from the Pacific Ocean in some places if you want to go one more time to the beach, most likely after you already spent several hours on the beach throughout the day! You can find there lots of magicians, tarot card readers, gun school promoters, restaurant advertisers, portrait painters, street musicians, God converters, police and occasional hookers. I spend most time around the musicians, doing some window shopping, and taking lots of pictures. I love the last activity a lot. The reason I am not taking my video camera with me is that the light is very often quite poor, and the video looks very grainy. Also the video gear is a bit bigger and easily noticeable by the people I try to film. This is sometimes a very big hindrance, and some form of hostility from the people I try to film results. On the other hand, the still camera is quite small, and not very visible at night. You can take lots of good photographs if you practice for a while under low light conditions. Whereas with the video, the street musicians suddenly start to throw some notes that never belonged to their gigs, or simply out of the blue get tired and quit playing, with the still camera, those problems are usually gone. ABC Stores are everywhere, stores that offer all basic essentials to live on through the night. Question: Why is the Steinlager beer from New Zealand so cheap? In the morning, the streets look very different, and sometimes you wonder if what you remember from the last night even happened at all!

Breakfast back in California: Pumpernickel from Germany, Mild Ajvar vegetable spread from Bulgaria, Passport green Manzanilla olives stuffed with pimentos from Spain, and Lipton tea from India. Amazing, although bought at Longs Drugs, everything from outside of the US!
http://www.mestemacher.de, http://www.intldelicacies.com, http://www.monini.com, http://www.lipton.com, http://www.longs.com.

#2, Collaboration Video

5:00 PM Pacific Ocean Sunset, California, November '07, artistic view.

Just finished my first collaboration video with a YouTube member from abroad. I shot the video, and he is going to play a flute to come up with a nice background for it. Not sure how long it is going to take, we have to wait now. Actually, it was his idea, let us see how this works out. The video will be called Beach Birds. It comes from a small place near the Pacific Ocean; beach scenes, small and large birds, boats, green plants, dry tall grasses, and sunsets. In HDV 1920 x 1080 it looks pretty impressive, loses slightly when it is shrunk to fit the YouTube window. I am trying to figure out if there is any other encoding scheme that would produce much smaller number of artifacts when converted to YouTube flash format. Is spending another several hundred dollars on Adobe Flash software the only solution? Also we ran into issues with sending video files over 100MB in size, simple thing would appear, but gmail is choking on them, and so is Yahoo email. When going through YouTube, a conversion occurs, so you end up with a lower quality video at the start of collaboration. Very nasty!
But let us finish this blog on a more positive note. I am working on a music piece for my other Oahu video which I decided to call Beach Time. Just realized that both videos use a word beach in them, hope it is not too many times.
In the last two days, I listened to Alicia Keys' latest CD As I Am and watched Shakira's DVD Oral Fixation Tour. Both were bought on Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com. A new book being read is Hearing and Writing Music, 2nd ed., by Ron Gorow. That one also came through Amazon.com.